[schoen]

I just chaired a session at the FOCI conference earlier today, where people were talking about Internet censorship circumvention technologies and how to prevent governments from blocking them. I'd like to remind everyone that the U.S. government has been one the largest funders of that research for decades. Some of it is under USAGM (formerly BBG, the parent of RFE/RL)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Globa...

and some of it has been under the State Department, partly pursuant to the global Internet freedom program introduced by Hillary Clinton in 2010 when she was Secretary of State.

I'm sure the political and diplomatic valence is very different here, but the concept of "the U.S. government paying to stop foreign governments from censoring the Internet" is a longstanding one.

[pasc1878]

But part of Agency has just been defunded

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/19/us-funding-for...

[RobotToaster]

This new "portal" will most likely only allow de facto government controlled sites like X.

[Waterluvian]

It’s a clear way to project soft power: make sure your message and culture can get through.

[pousada]

So far the current admin has been very successful in obliterating all the soft power the US built up through the decades.

[Mikhail_Edoshin]

And lies.

[hsuduebc2]

American culture can access Europeans at any time. Europeans consume American culture daily.Just to clarify. Website banned are often hostile propaganda or extremists.

This is only cringy lousy provocation for appearance of moral superiority.

Coming from a government notorious for spying on it's citizens it seems pretty ludicrous.

[nomilk]

It might do that too, but access to information is just so utterly critical, and exponentially moreso in circumstances where government brutally cracks down on it, as we saw in Egypt during the Arab Spring and we're seeing in Iran presently.

[iso1631]

Yet the US president unilaterally shut down Voice of America because he didn't like its message

Freedom of speech for me, not for thee

[locknitpicker]

> It’s a clear way to project soft power: make sure your message and culture can get through.

You're talking about an administration that actively tries to censor candidates of opposition candidates through both state regulatory institutions such as the FCC and business collusion, a typical play out of the fascist playbook with state and oligarchs colluding to strong arm their political goals.

It's also the same administration who is actively involved in supporting other dictatorial regimes and destabilize Europe, including with very explicit and overt threats of war of invasion to annex territories.

It's also the same administration that is clearly a puppet administration controlled by another totalitarian regime - Russia.

There is no soft power in this stunt. Only further self-destructive actions to further kill the US's relevance as an European ally.

[Aloisius]

Didn't Doge gut the USAGM?

[awwaiid]

Yep! Maximally closed as much as possible under the law. They also shut down other programs which aim to sidestep propaganda (including US propaganda), though some of those are starting to come back. Radio Free Asia, for example, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/radio-free-asia-s...

[Helmut10001]

This is somewhat counterintuitive: The US is the only country I know where most newspapers and government services use strict geoblocks to prevent me from accessing US sites in Europe. Conversely, I've never had any problems accessing European sites from the US. I know this is for a different set of reasons (likely GDPR cookie law or similar), but it's funny that anyone thinks blocks like this are relevant. Most people I know use VPNs these days to make their traffic appear to come from whatever country they need.

[pjc50]

And imgur has geoblocked the UK, which is extremely annoying as it was the reddit image host of choice.

It's going to be a weird set of content on this website. Are they going to livestream La Liga sports?

[herbst]

This. I regularly face geo blocks from American websites. Like literally at least once a week. It's very common for whatever reason for smaller US shops, newspapers any size and other random sites.

[pousada]

Only EU site I had a problem accessing that i can remember was from my electricity provider. Strangely enough they didn’t geoblock me but login threw an error because my local time didn’t match the local (German) timezone.

I changed my system timezone to Germany and it worked without issues, so I was wondering if it’s a very bad geoblock or something else entirely

[Ajedi32]

It makes sense to me. They're blocked in Europe because of European government polices, not American ones.

Maybe there's some sort of legal immunity the US government could grant to domestic sites which would allow them to lift those blocks without fear of reprisal?

[philwelch]

That's actually a related issue. European governments routinely and sometimes illegally attempt to enforce their laws against American websites, so if you run a website it's easier to just block the entire continent than to deal with that.

[tbrownaw]

> but it's funny that anyone thinks blocks like this are relevant. Most people I know use VPNs these days to make their traffic appear to come from whatever country they need.

The search AIs tell me it's around a third of people.

[ImJamal]

The EU has problems reaching non-US sites. RT for example. The block isn't on RT or Russia's side.

[kjksf]

Which US newspapers and which governments websites?

I happen to write this from Poland and I don't recall a single newspaper being geo blocked here. Not nyt, not washington post not anything I've ever accessed.

And didn't see US gov website geo blocked either.

So I ask again: which newspapers and which gov websites?

[adrian_b]

"has been" => "had been" (since a few days ago)

[throwaway24778]

I suppose COPPA is a form of internet censorship we help children bypass?

[Noaidi]

But will it let me torrent? /s

[mossTechnician]

Shortly after the American version of TikTok was established in January of 2026, users began reporting that certain content was creating error messages, including using words like "Epstein" in direct messages, which news outlet CNBC was able to replicate and confirm, with the error message reading: "This message may be in violation of our Community Guidelines, and has not been sent to protect our community." Other users reported similar messages for content critical of U.S. President Donald Trump or other topics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok

[motbus3]

Can you be more specific?

[reactordev]

It goes deeper than that. The U.S. Government funds it, discourages other nations from using it, and spies on all web traffic as a result of it.

Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA. Within a quick drive to Langley, Quantico, DC, and other places that house three letter agencies I’m not authorized to disclose.

[Aurornis]

> Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA

Nobody who understands the scale of the internet could possibly believe this is true.

Routing internet traffic through a geographical location would increase ping times by a noticeable amount.

Even sending traffic from around the world to a datacenter in VA would require an amount of infrastructure multiple times larger than the internet itself to carry data all that distance. All built and maintained in secret.

[recursive]

Speed of light establishes certain latency minima. Experimental data can falsify (or not) at geographical locations far enough from VA.

[ascorbic]

Most of the replies to this seem to think it's referring to some kind of secret government datacenter. It's us-east-1, and every other cloud provider's US East and GOV zones, which are all in NVA

[Den_VR]

So they… drive the data around NOVA?

[rootusrootus]

When I worked for a CLEC (during that moment in history when they were briefly a Thing), we had a USG closet at our main datacenter, and we are nowhere even close to NoVA. I expect they still handle it this way rather than try to funnel any significant amount of traffic to a particular geographical region.